More on mending! Visible Mending, Artful Stitchery to Repair and Refresh Your Favorite Things , by Jenny Wilding Cardon, is a great resource for anyone who wants to mend their own clothes, thrift store finds, and stained or torn children’s clothes.
This is a fun book which covers 5 different types of mending—Japanese Boro menidng which uses sashiko type stitching, hand embroidery, patches, darning and using a sewing machine to mend.
Each of the techniques has a list of supplies that will be needed and clear, tutorial-type photo illustrations of each step in the repair.
I love the author’s story about a repair on her son’s T-shirt (see above, the bright teal grid of squares in upper right corner). He loved it so much he wanted to wear it to school the next day. He couldn’t because it was needed as an illustration for this book, but she sent him off to look in his drawers to find another shirt in need of repair! If that’s not a vote of confidence, I don’t know what is!
Jenny has some really fun repairs: inset circles, holes left in place but turned into features with embroidery stitches that accent while stabilizing the hole, and woven darned repairs.
She doesn’t just have repairs for clothes. There is one on a the rubber of a pair of beloved sneakers and other on an American flag (with information about what repairs can and can not be done on a flag).
And finally, for folks who don’t want to do hand repairs, there a collection of machine mends with instruction s on how to do them.
This is a very useful book and I’m happy to own it because many of the techniques resonate with techniques used in quilting. It is also a book that will be great for a busy parent or a thrifter who is recycling and accenting old clothes.
